There are two offerings for high capacity wireless (hi-cap wireless) available in the market place today, pre-wimax and wimax hi-cap wireless services. In addition to services offered by telecom carriers municipalities have adopted the use of private fixed wireless solutions to support city wide video surveillance and safety communications. A key advantage to using wireless is by-passing the local incumbent exchange carrier (typically for most of the country this is now Verizon or ATT). Eliminating the local carrier enables the wireless connection to be installed within days not weeks or even months as compared with the local carrier. You should note that this time frame is dependent on whether the wireless network provider’s capacity has already been engineered to support the bandwidth you have purchased and whether you own your building or a third party owns/manages your building. Getting roof rights to mount the radio and antenna dish on the roof may cause a delay in the service being provisioned.
Once getting by these two issues bandwidth on fixed hi-cap wireless connections can be implemented with bandwidth of 1Gbps!! There are several types of fixed wireless broadband services available. Companies that have two locations that need to be connected can use a fixed wireless point-to-point (PtP) service. A PtP service is shown in the following illustration. The main concern of fixed wireless is known as line of sight (LOS). LOS means that there are no obstacles between the two locations that can hinder or block the radio signal.
A PtP is typically what you purchase from a wireless internet service provider (WISP) when procuring services for Internet access only. In this case the carrier’s site is the end point of the PtP.
Another fixed wireless service is called point-to-mulitpoint (PtMP). A PtMP allows for connectivity from multiple locations within a given area that have line of site to the “hub”. The following illustration provides a visual of this configuration.
In the case of a PtMP the multiple end points connect back wirelessly to a central hub antenna which then connects to the Internet. Each end point of the PtMP is isolated from the others so that the connectivity is secured. However, if the end points are of the same company the configuration can be set up such that end points can communicate with each other to share data, printing and even phone communications.
A third scenario for hi-cap wireless broadband is mesh networks. In a mesh network as shown in the following diagram each radio peers with radios that have a strong signal. In this way losing any one radio will not affect the availability of the network.
Wireless mesh networks are used to reliably provide high-speed wireless coverage throughout municipal areas and campus environments. Mesh networks consist of multiple independent signal transmitters, or nodes, which work together to transmit data through the network. These networks can also use multiple wireless backhauls to transfer network transmissions onto underlying physical data infrastructure. Many devices are available within the network to provide additional load in the event of a failure making mesh networks more reliable compared to wired, and Wi-Fi networks.
Mesh networks are typically used for a specific area. A metropolitan area or even a rural area may have multiple mesh networks within them to provide the optimal coverage. Each of these individual mesh networks must be brought back to a central location whereby end users can access the Internet. The picture below is a diagram illustrating the point of multiple mesh networks being brought back to a central facility via a wireless backhaul. The dotted blue lines in the diagram are the hi-cap wireless backhaul connections supporting the four wireless mesh networks. It is the backhaul connection that bandwidth of up to 1Gbps would be designed.
Broadband Crossing advisors have over 28 years of design, engineering, implementation and management of telecommunications experience. If you need help we are here to answer your questions and assist you in ordering, installing and managing the right solution for your company. Go to our contact page or better yet why not just start the process by generating a free price quote. Just go to www.broadbandcrossing.com and begin. Compare your current pricing for voice, data and Internet service against what we can provide and you will find that our pricing and service cannot be beat. Go ahead give us try.
